The Creative Thinking Handbook (2019) breaks down how to successfully apply creativity to solve challenges in today’s business and professional world. Starting with confronting the habits that block effective problem-solving, Chris Griffiths and Melina Costi present a strategy for kick-starting creative thinking and sustaining it throughout your project, business, and career.

Anyone who wants to up their creative problem-solving skills

Business leaders and managers who want to build a culture of creativity

People who want to adapt and succeed in an ever-changing world

Chris Griffiths is a leading expert on creative thinking and innovation. He has worked with Nobel Laureates, governments, and Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies. His company OpenGenius is behind Ayoa, a mind mapping and project management tool with over two million users.

Melina Costi is a business writer with a marketing management background. She co-authored The Positive Leader (2016) with former Microsoft Europe chairman Jan Mühlfeit. Griffiths and Costi’s first book together, Grasp the Solution (2011) climbed to number two on Amazon UK’s business chart.

Your Step-by-Step Guide to Problem Solving in Business

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The Creative Thinking Handbook (2019) breaks down how to successfully apply creativity to solve challenges in today’s business and professional world. Starting with confronting the habits that block effective problem-solving, Chris Griffiths and Melina Costi present a strategy for kick-starting creative thinking and sustaining it throughout your project, business, and career.

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To build creativity, we need to be strategic about how we think.

For most people, mornings are all about routine. We wake up and go through the motions of getting ready for the day ahead without having to think too much about it.

We can thank our brains for this. They recognise patterns in our thinking, store them, and pull them out when necessary. These thought patterns are great for everyday decisions and tasks like brushing our teeth or making a cup of coffee, but when it’s time to be creative they’re the last thing we need.

When faced with a new problem, routine ways of thinking only lead us to unimaginative ideas. If we want to move away from the unimaginative and towards the creative, we need to avoid relying on these patterns and create new strategies for our thinking.

Think about it like this: when a new year comes around and you set your new goals, you also decide on a plan to help you accomplish them. This plan could be a healthier diet and exercise routine to lose weight, or a series of online courses and books to learn a new skill. In the same way, you need a strategy to help change your thinking patterns and unleash your creativity.

You might think that learning to be more creative is only for artists and musicians, but the truth is that creativity is a skill that you need, whatever your profession.

If the world was as predictable as our mornings, routine thinking and unimaginative ideas would do the trick. But we live in a fast-changing world with opportunities and challenges that require out-of-the-ordinary solutions. In this context, creativity becomes almost a superpower. In fact, in the 2016 Future of Jobs report, the World Economic Forum listed creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving as the three most important skills to succeed in the 2020 workplace.

The first step to develop new thinking strategies that build these essential creative skills is recognizing the thinking patterns that hold us back. We’ll cover this in the next blink.